Iron Harvest is a new real-time strategy game from independent developer King Art Games. After a successful Kickstarter campaign raised over $1.2 million USD, they have been polishing the game for launch into a multiplayer alpha on Steam.
Driven by the designs of Polish artist Jakub Różalski, Iron Harvest reimagines the world shortly after World War I, where new technology created by Nikola Tesla allows dieselpunk-inspired tanks and mechs to dominate the European battlefield, where three factions slug it out: the Polania Republic, the Rusviet, and the Saxony Empire.
Iron Harvest’s impressive team includes big names like Adam Skorupa, composer for CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher series. It takes direct inspiration from RTS classics like Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, but puts a fresh spin on the genre with its unique setting and visual design.
Our hands-on demo featured an RTS spin on a horde mode, where four waves of enemy mechs, infantry, and gunners launched a full-fledged assault on our Polania base of operations. We had to capture neutral and enemy control points like an oil derrick, which allowed us to increase our resource production and churn out more friendly units.
The mech and tank design in Iron Harvest is fascinating. Centipede and spider-like tanks with writhing metal legs shoot huge cannons at enemy engineers, gunners, and control points. One of your mechs is damaged? Make sure to keep a crew of engineers and a cache of supplies on standby for repairs.
One of the best aspects of the demo was the destructibility of the environments: everything was destructible, and once enemy units or checkpoints were destroyed, they could be used by friendlies as cover for a limited period of time.
King Art Games told us they wanted to focus Iron Harvest on a robust single-player experience. They asked what fans of the genre wanted, and based elements of the game off a mountain of community feedback from social media platforms like Reddit.
Overwhelmingly, their players told them to avoid a MOBA-like experience and to keep focused on a robust single-player campaign that could be played in co-op with friends. Iron Harvest is designed as a hardcore RTS for fans of classic single-player RTS campaigns.
Their team said they were as much inspired by old-school point-and-click adventures as RTS classics like Starcraft, but the content in this demo was gameplay, not story. King Art told us that more details on the game’s story content would be forthcoming.
Iron Harvest doesn’t have a release window they’re willing to share with us yet, but King Art told us we could expect to hear more about their release plans around the time of Gamescom.
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